Marvel: Crisis Protocol

Ancient One was a pretty fun project. For starters, I saw someone do the base effect online and knew I had to steal it. It’s too good an idea. Also gives me a chance to use up some of the “metal plate” bases, which frankly I’m not the biggest fan of so I end up with tons of them. I ended up needing to use a metal washer in the base, which was a little tricky because I also use Magnaracks for transport, so I had to be careful to get it situated along with the magnet correctly.

As far as painting goes, she was fairly straight forward. I knew I wanted to use my normal yellow recipe, save for the energy effects, which I wanted to have more of a fiery feel to them, so I used oranges as shades for those. Highlighting black is feeling more and more natural. One of things I’ve learned in this project that I think is really counter-intuitive is that often to make something look more detailed you use less paint. Had I painted her at the start of this project the black would’ve had a ton more greys on it because I was trying to go “all the way to white” and I hadn’t yet figured out that to make a color like red, black, white or yellow look like those colors, you use your highlights sparingly and you can still take it to white and get the “pop” contrast effect without making it look like my first Black Widow model.

I’ve also noticed that as I paint more and more I care more about getting the face right. I’m now actively trying to do eyes whereas I used to just rely on a wash to make the eye socket area look shaded. I now try to plan out where I want the highlights to hit to emphasize certain sections of the checkbone or forehead depending on the model’s facial structure and where the lighting would fall on their face. I didn’t use to think about those things. So with Ancient One I explicitly tried to emphasize the lighting on the bottom right side of her face to make the shadow from her cowl look realistic.

Overall I’m really happy with her (I need to find another way to say that as I say it way too often). I painted her while kind of assembly line painting the most recent batch of my Convocation characters and this time around I don’t feel like the assembly line style of painting harmed the paint jobs like it did the first time I did it.